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by Abe Koogler, directed by Ted Dykstra

Coal Mine Theatre, 2076 Danforth Avenue, Toronto

November 20-December 14, 2025

Alex: “Maybe we’ll become totally new people”

Fulfillment Center is a disquieting comedy about personal relations. With grim amusement we watch how four lonely people sabotage their chances at future happiness. In this play from 2017, American playwright Abe Koogler presents a group portrait of Americans who quite possibly will not be able to meet even their severely scaled down versions of their goals in life. Bring this portrait to vivid life are the outstanding performances of the cast under the astute direction of Ted Dykstra.

Koogler has structured his play as a series of eleven duologues. There are two male actors and two female actors. The men interact with both women and the women interact with both men. But the two women never share a scene nor do the two men. This structure deliberately destroys any feeling of our witnessing a community on stage in contrast, say, to any of Chekhov’s major plays where at some point everyone interacts with everyone else.

The action is set in 2015 somewhere in New Mexico that is not Albuquerque or Santa Fe. It begins with a scene both funny and sad that encapsulates the mood of the whole play. In a huge Amazon-like warehouse, the Fulfillment Center of the title, Alex, a man in his 30s, is testing Suzan, a woman in her 60s, to see how quickly she can move around obstacles and shift boxes from one place to another. Suzan barely qualifies and is completely out of breath. When Alex tells her she will have to do this for seven hours, Suzan acts unfazed, even though it is hard for us to believe she can do this.

Suzan pleads with Alex that she needs this job because her car just died and she has no money to fix it much less achieve her goal of travelling to Maine. Alex, himself feeling overwhelmed in his job as a manager, is sympathetic to Suzan although he tries to maintain a professional distance. Her plea that she is doing well for her age is an absurd thing to say to a man whose priority is efficiency, Yet, after Suzan cures Alex of his headache, he hires her anyway. We know that Suzan’s decision to apply for the job and to pretend she can do it and Alex’s decision to hire Suzan are two bad choices which will not end well. And, of course, they don’t.

The play proceeds to chronicle the bad decisions made by all four characters. Alex has moved from New York City to take this job after being fired for unclear reasons from a startup. Madeleine, his girlfriend since university, has followed him to New Mexico, despite Alex’s telling her she need not come, and hates everything about the place. Virtually everything that Alex says or does upsets her, including his attempt to give her an engagement ring. This makes it difficult to see how the two have stayed together this long and how Madeleine could not know how different life in New Mexico would be to life in New York.

Meanwhile, we see that Suzan is living in a tent at a campground. She tries to befriend John, an aimless man in his 40s, who does nothing but tinker away at his car. His monosyllabic replies hint that he has no desire to befriend anyone, yet Suzan embarrassingly tries to win him over with compliments.

It is a major surprise in a subsequent scene when we see John and Madeleine meeting up for a date. In this, the funniest scene in the play, Madeleine, who has dressed up for the occasion, is aghast to see John, who has arrived in his work clothes. The two have met online but mistakes do happen and their instant animosity is hilarious. Madeleine’s chronic self-centredness causes John to call her a “bitch”, while John’s quietness and expressionless voice make Madeleine wonder what tool he is planning to use to murder her.

Once Koogler has finished his first set of duologues, each character having spoken to the other two of the opposite sex at least once, he gives us a second set in which the relations between the characters only become worse, although, with much effort on Suzan’s part, John becomes more willing to listen to her. The play ends on an extremely ambiguous note. Alex, who never learns about Madeleine’s online dating use, goes off with her thinking “Maybe we’ll become totally new people” – a notion we can only view as delusional. Suzan finds herself worse off than before but what will actually happen to her is left unknown.

Koogler presents us with a picture of a society than has broken down – one where individuals feel so beaten down, they have set themselves only miniscule goals or none at all, where they have become so self-absorbed they don’t know how to listen. Fulfillment Center is a too obviously ironic title for a world where “fulfillment” only means receiving a package on time and has nothing to do with personal fulfillment.

Nick Blais captures this idea in extremely imaginative design. The set features a corrugated back wall with 16 corrugated cardboard cube boxes. More cube boxes sit on the floor made of squares of what looks like corrugated carboard separated by gratings with lights underneath. The wall-mounted boxes serve as cupboards with flaps that open and close, and (surprise) one of the boxes on the floor can be pulled up to form a table, two can be pulled up to use as stools and three together lit from within serve as the hood of John’s car. The design extends the idea of the “fulfillment centre” beyond the actual warehouse itself to the whole world around it.

What makes the play come alive are the superlative performances of the entire cast. As Suzan, Kristen Thomson gives a performance to cherish. Thomson is so perfect in the role it could have been written for her. Thompson uses her nervous fluttering laugh to signal Suzan’s awareness of her flaws as they become exposed and the futility of her endeavours even as she pursues them. I haven’t seen such a rich, nuanced portrayal of a character in a modern play for a long time.

Evan Buliung gives a superb performance as always. Even when John is silent, Buliung projects a rage hidden inside the man that John has struggled to tame. Buliung initially presents John as a man beaten down by all the mistakes he has made in life. John is unwilling to get close to anyone for fear of making more mistakes yet desperate to get close to someone to whom he can unburden the thoughts that plague him. Buliung’s performance is a masterclass in how to make a quiet man disquieting.

As Alex, Emilio Vieira clearly depicts the internal conflicts of a man who wants to succeed but is secretly aware that he is too weak to do so. This weakness leads him to hire Suzan and to let her work as long as he does. This weakness leads him to stay with Madeleine who does nothing but abuse him. When Alex finally does muster the strength to fire Suzan, Vieira makes us feel that Alex also loses some of his humanity.

Gita Miller gives us a comically shrewish Madeleine. She makes Madeleine’s torrent of complaints about everything in New Mexico and her continual putting down of Alex so extreme that we feel there can hardly be any saving grace to a character who is so egocentric. Yet, when we see that Madeleine brings the same readiness to complain to her first meeting with a stranger Miller makes us wonder whether Madeleine’s off-putting behaviour is really a cover for fear and an awareness of her own weaknesses.

Ted Dykstra directs the play as if it were a piece of music. The pace of the action, every pause, every style ofline delivery feels so well judged that it lends a sense of purpose to a play about four purposeless lives. The characters in Koogler’s play may not find fulfillment, but Dykstra and his cast make watching them attempt to go on living in spite of everything fulfilling in itself.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Kristen Thomson as Suzan; Emilio Vieira as Alex and Gita Miller as Madeleine; Evan Buliung as John and Kristen Thomson as Suzan. © 2025 Elana Emer.

For tickets visit: www.coalminetheatre.com.